Exporting Animations via blend files - Common Asset Duplication
For anyone else getting started with Blender &gt;= 2.8.3, there are many animation features.
The best seems to be to use :
The dope sheet editor to capture an animation that has several objects being animated as a single animation.
The animation editor to capture multiple animations for a single character/game object ie idle1, idle2, walking.
When you import these assets into unity as fbx files, you can split the animations anyway you like, but the best I found seems to be splitting them into fbx's that contain the meshes and armatures that the animations are applied to, so have an fbx for a single game object and its animations, then one fbx with any animations that cross single objects, including again all the meshes and armatures.